This is an archive of past discussions with User:MusikAnimal. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Hey Musik. I made a change that caused twotemplates to be brought down from 100k transclusions to <200 each—a massive decrease. MusikBot II didn't protect those pages, but I had the thought that it could unprotect those pages when their usages decreased. Do you think that it would be a good idea? SWinxy (talk) 00:37, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
Definitely! That was the original plan. The community consultation however raised concerns about possible wheel-warring among other things, so I decided against that functionality for the first iteration. It's been several years now with little to no complaints with this bot, so maybe I'll propose auto-unprotection. This would be especially useful for template sandboxes. They often get placed in some other highly-transcluded template while testing, so the bot correctly protects it, but then when the test is over we're left with a needlessly protected sandbox (which are supposed to be open to editing).
Surely you could prevent the wheel-warring by going, if latest edit protection log user is MusikBot or none, then unprotect. Zippybonzo | Talk (he|him) 03:31, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
Those rules would exclude the two templates, since they were protected prior to MusikBot II. The current exclusion system would work imo. SWinxy (talk) 05:14, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
A very minor problem with MusikBot II
I am not sure anything needs to be done, but wanted to let you know there is a very minor problem with MusikBot II. Someone has been vandalizing AFDs in part adding Template:pp-sock. Then MusikBot II will step in and remove the template, but not the rest of the vandalism, meaning that one click reverts to fight vandalism are hard to perform. Reverting to the older version is still fine so it's not too bad. Here is an example change history that might be illustrative [1] —siroχo19:06, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
Yes, this has been brought up many times. First, it should be made clear the vandal is aware of the bot (obviously), that I operate it, and may be reading this discussion. For this reason I won't go into any details. I've worked with a few admins and patrollers over email on this matter and am happy to discuss further off-wiki. Also, note you can use WP:POPUPS to revert to any revision with just one click from the revision history. — MusikAnimaltalk20:21, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Section-level Image Suggestions feature has been deployed on seven Wikipedias (Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Catalan, Hungarian, Finnish and Norwegian Bokmål). The feature recommends images for articles on contributors' watchlists that are a good match for individual sections of those articles.
Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool for administrators to help fight spam. It provides a clearer interface for blocking plain domains (and their subdomains), is more easily searchable, and is faster for the software to process for each edit on the wiki. It does not support regex (for complex cases), nor URL path-matching, nor the MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist, but otherwise it replaces most of the functionalities of the existing MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. There is a Python script to help migrate all simple domains into this tool, and more feature details, within the tool's documentation. It is available at all wikis except for Meta-wiki, Commons, and Wikidata. [3]
The WikiEditor extension was updated. It includes some of the most frequently used features of wikitext editing. In the past, many of its messages could only be translated by administrators, but now all regular translators on translatewiki can translate them. Please check the state of WikiEditor localization into your language, and if the "Completion" for your language shows anything less than 100%, please complete the translation. See a more detailed explanation.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).
The default protocol of Special:LinkSearch and API counterparts has changed from http to both http and https. [4]
Special:LinkSearch and its API counterparts will now search for all of the URL provided in the query. It used to be only the first 60 characters. This feature was requested fifteen years ago. [5]
Future changes
There is an experiment with a ChatGPT plugin. This is to show users where the information is coming from when they read information from Wikipedia. It has been tested by Wikimedia Foundation staff and other Wikimedians. Soon all ChatGPT plugin users can use the Wikipedia plugin. This is the same plugin which was mentioned in Tech News 2023/20. [6]
There is an ongoing discussion on a proposed Third-party resources policy. The proposal will impact the use of third-party resources in gadgets and userscripts. Based on the ideas received so far, policy includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, some best practices and exemption requirements such as code transparency and inspectability. Your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on on the policy talk page.
Makes sense! A lot of the code is hardwired around the requests living in the WP:PERM ecosystem, but I've long wanted to make it work anywhere and everywhere. I won't be able to work on it in the near future but I've added it to my to-dos :) Thanks for the suggestion, — MusikAnimaltalk17:06, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
Oh! I saw the perm links at the end of the line and thought they were from the script (since they came after the (assign permissions) link) but it looks like they're actually at the end of {{rfplinks}}. At the very least I'll be able to update that and get a link to +IA more easily, so no rush on the script :-) Primefac (talk) 19:59, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
July 19 WikiWednesday + New York Botanical Garden Edit-a-thon (July 29)
We are proud to announce that monthly free food has returned!
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate. Prime Produce encourages the wearing of masks when indoors, and especially be mindful of those in your proximity.
Bring your own laptop if you can, the Library can only provide laptops on a first-come, first-served basis. Entrance to the Library is free; when you arrive, alert Security that you are here for the event. Please enter through the Mosholu Entrance at 2950 Southern Boulevard.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (calendar).
MediaWiki system messages will now look for available local fallbacks, instead of always using the default fallback defined by software. This means wikis no longer need to override each language on the fallback chain separately. For example, English Wikipedia doesn't have to create en-ca and en-gb subpages with a transclusion of the base pages anymore. This makes it easier to maintain local overrides. [7]
The action=growthsetmentorstatus API will be deprecated with the new MediaWiki version. Bots or scripts calling that API should use the action=growthmanagementorlist API now. [8]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).
The bot is incorrectly flagging users as having created zero articles. This [9]user has actually created 382 articles, and there's at least two more examples on the current revision of the page. Beeblebrox (talk) 01:34, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Synchronizer tool is now available to keep Lua modules synced across Wikimedia wikis, along with updated documentation to develop global Lua modules and templates.
The tag filter on Special:NewPages and revision history pages can now be inverted. For example, you can hide edits that were made using an automated tool. [10][11]
The Wikipedia ChatGPT plugin experiment can now be used by ChatGPT users who can use plugins. You can participate in a video call if you want to talk about this experiment or similar work. [12]
Problems
It was not possible to generate a PDF for pages with non-Latin characters in the title, for the last two weeks. This has now been fixed. [13]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (calendar).
Starting on Tuesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [14]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Mobile Web editors can now edit a whole page at once. To use this feature, turn on "⧼Mobile-frontend-mobile-option-amc⧽" in your settings and use the "Edit full page" button in the "More" menu. [15]
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person, you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.
This is the first big summer Wiknic since the 2019 edition and will feature an edit-a-thon focused on Governors Island and ArtCrawl Harlem, Depths of Wikipedia (recently of perpetual stew fame), as well as plenty more food topics drawing on the potluck ethos. All are welcome, new and experienced!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Content translation system is no longer using Youdao's machine translation service. The service was in place for several years, but due to no usage, and availability of alternatives, it was deprecated to reduce maintenance overheads. Other services which cover the same languages are still available. [16]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Latin Wikipedia, Ladino Wikipedia, Luxembourgish Wikipedia, Lak Wikipedia, Lezghian Wikipedia, Lingua Franca Nova Wikipedia, Ganda Wikipedia, Limburgish Wikipedia, Ligurian Wikipedia, Lombard Wikipedia, Lingala Wikipedia, Latgalian Wikipedia, Latvian Wikipedia, Maithili Wikipedia, Basa Banyumasan Wikipedia, Moksha Wikipedia, Malagasy Wikipedia, Armenian Wikipedia, Kyrgyz Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [17]
This is a very small problem, but I've noticed that MusikBot tends to put AFI banners at the very start of the article instead of after hatnotes, e.g. [18]Aaron Liu (talk) 14:28, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).
Fixed with Special:Diff/1170879619. As per the administrator instructions (only admins will see the link to this), any resolution template that needs to be overridden must either be deactivated ala {{tl|done}}, or you can force archiving with {{User:MusikBot/override|d}} (done) or {{User:MusikBot/override|nd}} (not done). There's also {{User:MusikBot/archivenow}} to force immediate archiving. — MusikAnimaltalk19:14, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
This is the first summer Wiknic since the 2019 edition and will feature an edit-a-thon focused Governors Island and ArtCrawl Harlem, Depths of Wikipedia and perpetual stew, as well as plenty more food. All are welcome, new and experienced!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
As part of the changes for the better diff handling of paragraph splits, improved detection of splits is being rolled out. Over the last two weeks, we deployed this support to group0 and group1 wikis. This week it will be deployed to group2 wikis. [29]
All Special:Contributions pages now show the user's local edit count and the account's creation date. [30]
Wikisource users can now use the prpbengalicurrency label to denote Bengali currency characters as page numbers inside the <pagelist> tag. [31]
Two preferences have been relocated. The preference "Enable the visual editor" is now shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis. Previously it was shown on the "Beta features" tab at some wikis. The preference "Use the wikitext mode inside the visual editor, instead of a different wikitext editor" is now also shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis, instead of the "Beta features" tab. [32][33]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).
All right-to-left language wikis, plus Korean, Armenian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Bulgarian Wikipedias, will have a link in the sidebar that provides a short URL of that page, using the Wikimedia URL Shortener. This feature will come to more wikis in future weeks. [34]
Future changes
The removal of the DoubleWiki extension is being discussed. This extension currently allows Wikisource users to view articles from multiple language versions side by side when the <=> symbol next to a specific language edition is selected. Comments on this are welcomed at the phabricator task.
A proposal has been made to merge the second hidden-categories list (which appears below the wikitext editing form) with the main list of categories (which is further down the page). More information is available on Phabricator; feedback is welcome!
Following an RfC, TFAs will be automatically semi-protected the day before it is on the main page and through the day after.
A discussion at WP:VPP about revision deletion and oversight for dead names found that [s]ysops can choose to use revdel if, in their view, it's the right tool for this situation, and they need not default to oversight. But oversight could well be right where there's a particularly high risk to the person. Use your judgment.
The SmallCat dispute case has closed. As part of the final decision, editors participating in XfD have been reminded to be careful about forming local consensus which may or may not reflect the broader community consensus. Regular closers of XfD forums were also encouraged to note when broader community discussion, or changes to policies and guidelines, would be helpful.
Miscellaneous
Tech tip: The "Browse history interactively" banner shown at the top of Special:Diff can be used to easily look through a history, assemble composite diffs, or find out what archive something wound up in.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
EditInSequence, a feature that allows users to edit pages faster on Wikisource has been moved to a Beta Feature based on community feedback. To enable it, you can navigate to the beta features tab in Preferences. [35]
There is a new option for Administrators when they are changing the usergroups for a user, to add the user’s user page to their watchlist. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API. [37]
The LoginNotify extension was not sending notifications since January. It has now been fixed, so going forward, you may see notifications for failed login attempts, and successful login attempts from a new device. [39]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Eastern Mari Wikipedia, Maori Wikipedia, Minangkabau Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Mongolian Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Western Mari Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Maltese Wikipedia, Mirandese Wikipedia, Erzya Wikipedia, Mazanderani Wikipedia, Nāhuatl Wikipedia, Neapolitan Wikipedia, Low German Wikipedia, Low Saxon Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Newari Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Novial Wikipedia, N'Ko Wikipedia, Nouormand Wikipedia, Northern Sotho Wikipedia, Navajo Wikipedia, Nyanja Wikipedia, Occitan Wikipedia, Livvi-Karelian Wikipedia, Oromo Wikipedia, Oriya Wikipedia, Ossetic Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Pangasinan Wikipedia, Pampanga Wikipedia, Papiamento Wikipedia, Picard Wikipedia, Pennsylvania German Wikipedia, Palatine German Wikipedia, Norfuk / Pitkern Wikipedia, Piedmontese Wikipedia, Western Punjabi Wikipedia, Pontic Wikipedia, Pashto Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [40][41]
The Members' Meeting is similar to other WikiWednesday meetups, except that its primary function is to elect a new Board of Directors. We will elect five board seats. After being elected, those elected can potentially appoint more seats. We will also have a fun WikiWednesday!
Election info:
To run for election or to vote, you must be a dues-paying member of Wikimedia New York City, having renewed in the past 12 months.
Voting will be both online, via emailed ballots from the ElectionBuddy service, and in-person.
The poll will be open for the 48 hours between 8pm EDT on September 18 and 8pm EDT on September 20.
For additional information, please consult the Election FAQ.
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person, you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
ORES, the revision evaluation service, is now using a new open-source infrastructure on all wikis except for English Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two will follow this week. If you notice any unusual results from the Recent Changes filters that are related to ORES (for example, "Contribution quality predictions" and "User intent predictions"), please report them. [42]
When you are logged in on one Wikimedia wiki and visit a different Wikimedia wiki, the system tries to log you in there automatically. This has been unreliable for a long time. You can now visit the login page to make the system try extra hard. If you feel that made logging in better or worse than it used to be, your feedback is appreciated. [43]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
As part of the changes for the Better diff handling of paragraph splits wishlist proposal, the inline switch widget in diff pages is being rolled out this week to all wikis. The inline switch will allow viewers to toggle between a unified inline or two-column diff wikitext format. [44]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 20 September. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [45]
The Enterprise API is launching a new feature called "breaking news". Currently in BETA, this attempts to identify likely "newsworthy" topics as they are currently being written about in any Wikipedia. Your help is requested to improve the accuracy of its detection model, especially on smaller language editions, by recommending templates or identifiable editing patterns. See more information at the documentation page on MediaWiki or the FAQ on Meta.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
MediaWiki now has a stable interface policy for frontend code that more clearly defines how we deprecate MediaWiki code and wiki-based code (e.g. gadgets and user scripts). Thank you to everyone who contributed to the content and discussions. [46][47]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (calendar).
New Page Review article queue, March to September 2023
Backlog update:
At the time of this message, there are 11,300 articles and 15,600 redirects awaiting review. This is the highest backlog in a long time. Please help out by doing additional reviews!
October backlog elimination drive:
A one-month backlog drive for October will start in one week! Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled. Articles will earn 4x as many points compared to redirects. You can sign up here.
PageTriage code upgrades:
Upgrades to the PageTriage code, initiated by the NPP open letter in 2022 and actioned by the WMF Moderator Tools Team in 2023, are ongoing. More information can be found here. As part of this work, the Special:NewPagesFeed now has a new version in beta! The update leaves the NewPagesFeed appearance and function mostly identical to the old one, but updates the underlying code, making it easier to maintain and helping make sure the extension is not decommissioned due to maintenance issues in the future. You can try out the new Special:NewPagesFeed here - it will replace the current version soon.
Notability tip:
Professors can meet WP:PROF #1 by having their academic papers be widely cited by their peers. When reviewing professor articles, it is a good idea to find their Google Scholar or Scopus profile and take a look at their h-index and number of citations. As a very rough rule of thumb, for most fields, articles on people with a h-index of twenty or more, a first-authored paper with more than a thousand citations, or multiple papers each with more than a hundred citations are likely to be kept at AfD.
Reviewing tip:
If you would like like a second opinion on your reviews or simply want another new page reviewer by your side when patrolling, we recommend pair reviewing! This is where two reviewers use Discord voice chat and screen sharing to communicate with each other while reviewing the same article simultaneously. This is a great way to learn and transfer knowledge.
Hi MusikAnimal! I noticed that {{Navbox documentation}} hasn't been template-protected, despite reaching >5000 transclusions a month or so ago. Is the bot that protects high-risk templates operating properly? {{u|Sdkb}}talk15:04, 22 September 2023 (UTC)
@Sdkb It doesn't do any re-protections, or removal of protection for that matter. I have a mental note to propose this expansion of functionality, as suggested here ~2 months ago, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Lowering/removing protection is one thing, but I do worry about the bot elevating protection when an admin deliberately kept it lower. Ideally we'd have a way to respect that without requiring admins add to the bot's exclusion list every time. Maybe it could scan the last year's worth of edits to the template to see if any editors would get shut out after elevating protection, or something like that. — MusikAnimaltalk21:56, 22 September 2023 (UTC)
I'm ambivalent about what the best workaround is for templates deliberately kept at a lower protection level, but this does seem like a hole that we should ideally try to find a way to plug. {{u|Sdkb}}talk22:03, 22 September 2023 (UTC)
Sun Oct 1: NYC Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month 2023
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person, you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Vector 2022 skin will now remember the pinned/unpinned status for the Table of Contents for all logged-out users. [50]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September (calendar).
Gadget definitions will have a new "namespaces" option. The option takes a list of namespace IDs. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages in the given namespaces.
Future changes
New variables will be added to AbuseFilter: global_account_groups and global_account_editcount. They are available only when an account is being created. You can use them to prevent blocking automatic creation of accounts when users with many edits elsewhere visit your wiki for the first time. [51][52]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 27 October at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new user preference for "Always enable safe mode". This setting will make pages load without including any on-wiki JavaScript or on-wiki stylesheet pages. It can be useful for debugging broken JavaScript gadgets. [53]
Gadget definitions now have a new "contentModels" option. The option takes a list of page content models, like wikitext or css. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages with the given content models.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (calendar).
Future changes
The Vector 2022 skin will no longer use the custom styles and scripts of Vector legacy (2010). The change will be made later this year or in early 2024. See how to adjust the CSS and JS pages on your wiki. [54]
An RfC is open regarding amending the paid-contribution disclosure policy to add the following text: Any administrator soliciting clients for paid Wikipedia-related consulting or advising services not covered by other paid-contribution rules must disclose all clients on their userpage.
Technical news
Administrators can now choose to add the user's user page to their watchlist when changing the usergroups for a user. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API. (T272294)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Fon (w:fon:) [55]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Swahili Wikipedia, Walloon Wikipedia, Waray Wikipedia, Wolof Wikipedia, Kalmyk Wikipedia, Xhosa Wikipedia, Mingrelian Wikipedia, Yiddish Wikipedia, Yoruba Wikipedia, Zhuang Wikipedia, Zeelandic Wikipedia, Min Nan Wikipedia, Zulu Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [56]
At some wikis, newcomers are suggested images from Commons to add to articles without any images. Starting on Tuesday, newcomers at these wikis will be able to add images to unillustrated article sections. The specific wikis are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table. You can learn more about this feature.[57]
In the mobile web skin (Minerva) the CSS ID #page-actions will be replaced with #p-views. This change is to make it consistent with other skins and to improve support for gadgets and extensions in the mobile skin. A few gadgets may need to be updated; there are details and search-links in the task.
Adding an incorrect protection template will cause the page to be placed in Category:Wikipedia pages with incorrect protection templates, so if the bot doesn't remove the invalid template, a human will soon enough. You can't fully protect your user page anyway as you're not an admin (because if it were fully protected, you wouldn't be able to edit it!). But, if you'd like your user page to be semi-protected, you can request this at WP:RFPP. — MusikAnimaltalk23:20, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
Wiki.NYC Pavilion for Open House New York (Oct 21–22) and Wikidata Day (Oct 29)
At both events, all attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person, you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
Hello! I've been following MusikBot for a bit on the WP:AFI pages in order to tidy things up, and I wanted to alert you (because it just happened, but has happened multiple times before in the last few years) about the fact that MusikBot periodically seems to be dropping updates for the Wikipedia:Articles for improvement/Articles/List as well as at the accomplishments page, although this appears to be less frequent (at Wikipedia:Articles for improvement/Accomplishments). In regards to the list, because there is a new article picked every week, I would think that there would be one removal per week. I first noticed that the updates expected on 3 April 2023 were missing, but then it happened again on 2 October and once again today on 16 October. At that point, I started to dig deeper and noticed that there are a good handful of entries on the AFI list which were ran back in 2020, but never taken off, leading to those entries running as the AFI multiple times in a handful of weeks, and staying on the list to this day. I wanted to let you know because I'm not sure whether there was outside information that I was not missing, but this seems to be a possible problem. The automation is a big help regardless, so thank you! Utopes(talk / cont)01:23, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
scriptManager not working after maintenance edit
Hi @MusikAnimal, the scriptManager doesn't seem to work after this edit by a WMF staff. Could you please revert that edit? (as almost all my scripts are toggled through scriptManager) I have also imported the older version that works, so reverting it should fix the script. ~~2NumForIce (speak|edits) 17:31, 14 October 2023 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Unified login system's edge login should now be fixed for some browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera). This means that if you visit a new sister project wiki, you should be logged in automatically without the need to click "Log in" or reload the page. Feedback on whether it's working for you is welcome. [58]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 October. It will be on all wikis from 19 October (calendar).
Future changes
In 3 weeks, in the Vector 2022 skin, code related to addPortletLink and #p-namespaces that was deprecated one year ago will be removed. If you notice tools that should appear next to the "Discussion" tab are then missing, please tell the gadget's maintainers to see instructions in the Phabricator task.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new Language and internationalization newsletter, written quarterly. It contains updates on new feature development, improvements in various language-related technical projects, and related support work.
Source map support has been enabled on all wikis. When you open the debugger in your browser's developer tools, you should be able to see the unminified JavaScript source code. [59]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 October. It will be on all wikis from 26 October (calendar).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Structured Content team, as part of its project of improving UploadWizard on Commons, made some UX improvements to the upload step of choosing own vs not own work (T347590), as well as to the licensing step for own work (T347756).
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (calendar).
Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 2 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for many languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [60][61]
Starting November 1, the impact module (Special:Impact) will be upgraded by the Growth team. The new impact module shows newcomers more data regarding their impact on the wiki. It was tested by a few wikis during the last few months. [62]
Hello, I would like to express my gratitude to MusikBot for its assistance at WP:PERM. I have noticed that the bot does not archive requests with the denial reason "Not Yet." Consequently, I have manually archived some of these requests myself, as I observed that they were becoming stale.
I have observed that @HJ Mitchell often uses "Not Yet" as the denial reason, and these requests tend to go stale instead of being archived. This is because the administrator prioritizes fresh requests from the same user after the reason for denying the initial requests is met. "Not yet" is used as {{nd|Not done}} with the same {{nd}} template.
In light of this, I believe it would be advantageous to archive these "Not Yet" requests a day or two later than standard "Not Done" requests. This adjustment would be particularly helpful because "Not Yet" is used as a synonym for "Not Done" on PERM. What are your thoughts on this? -- 𝙳𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚖𝚁𝚒𝚖𝚖𝚎𝚛𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚌𝚞𝚜𝚜09:28, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
@DreamRimmer Thanks for bringing this to my attention! I have adjusted the configuration so that {{nd|Not yet}} will archive in the same way {{nd}} does. This was always the intended behaviour, so I don't think there's a need to treat "Not yet" any different than the normal "Not done". Best, — MusikAnimaltalk21:26, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
WikiProject Articles for creation is holding a month long Backlog Drive!
The goal of this drive is to reduce the backlog of unreviewed drafts to less than 2 months outstanding reviews from the current 4+ months. Bonus points will be given for reviewing drafts that have been waiting more than 30 days. The drive is running from 1 November 2023 through 30 November 2023.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, the default font-size of a number of navigational elements (tagline, tools menu, navigational links, and more) has been increased slightly to match the font size used in page content. [63]
Problems
Last week, there was a problem displaying some recent edits on a few wikis, for 1-6 hours. The edits were saved but not immediately shown. This was due to a database problem. [64]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).
The Growth team will reassign newcomers from former mentors to the currently active mentors. They have also changed the notification language to be more user-friendly. [65][66]
Following a motion, the contentious topic designation of Prem Rawat has been struck. Actions previously taken using this contentious topic designation are still in force.
Following several motions, multiple topic areas are no longer designated as a contentious topic. These contentious topic designations were from the Editor conduct in e-cigs articles, Liancourt Rocks, Longevity, Medicine, September 11 conspiracy theories, and Shakespeare authorship question cases.
Following a motion, remedies 3.1 (All related articles under 1RR whenever the dispute over naming is concerned), 6 (Stalemate resolution) and 30 (Administrative supervision) of the Macedonia 2 case have been rescinded.
Following a motion, remedy 6 (One-revert rule) of the The Troubles case has been amended.
An arbitration case named Industrial agriculture has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case close 8 November.
Miscellaneous
The Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in November 2023, with 700+ drafts pending reviews for in the last 4 months or so. In addition to the AfC participants, all administrators and New Page Patrollers can conduct reviews using the helper script, Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person, you should be vaccinated and be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Last week, users who previously visited Meta-Wiki or Wikimedia Commons and then became logged out on those wikis could not log in again. The problem is now resolved. [71]
Last week, some pop-up dialogs and menus were shown with the wrong font size. The problem is now resolved. [72]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).
Future changes
Reference Previews are coming to many wikis as a default feature. They are popups for references, similar to the PagePreviews feature. You can opt out of seeing them. If you are using the gadgets Reference Tooltips or Navigation Popups, you won’t see Reference Previews. Deployment is planned for November 22, 2023.
Canary (also known as heartbeat) events will be produced into Wikimedia event streams from December 11. Streams users are advised to filter out these events, by discarding all events where meta.domain == "canary". Updates to Pywikibot or wikimedia-streams will discard these events by default. [73]
Update in regards to AFI nominations with title disambiguations
Hello! I wanted to pop by here again because I think I've identified the central point where MusikBot has been having issues in regards to AFI, and the alert on User talk:MusikAnimal/Archive 46#MusikBot dropping AFI related updates. I was organizing the AFI noms and setting things up for the next few weeks, and my intention was to remove all of the dropped-nominations from the nominations list before the next pick gets chosen. However, in doing so, I started to realize what looked to be a (possible) root cause for the drops in the first place. MusikBot has never removed any titles with parentheses for the last 7 years since 2016, which is when I started tracking the new past-accomplishments for history. Because of this, it's created a handful of statistically-improbable shenanigans seen at Wikipedia:Articles for improvement/Accomplishments, such as Talk:Act (drama) running on three different weeks since 2020, Talk:Organ (anatomy) running for SIX different weeks since 2017, and other pages with disambiguators running several times each such as Talk:The Sims (video game), Talk:Bookworm (insect), and Talk:Letter (alphabet), with all only being recently removed except one being "organ (anatomy)". I was mainly confused how that one escaped, although it turns out that particular case was a one-off removal in 2021 here: Special:Diff/1037847935. Nevertheless, I'm not fully sure exactly how to go about tackling this issue from a technical perspective on the backend, but the manual stuff at the frontend has since been taken care of to my knowledge, as my reason for bringing this up the first time was that Power (social and political) followed by Play (theatre) did not get removed in quick succession. Hopefully there is a feasible way to deal with this bug, as the list-searching-mechanism the bot uses may be ignoring the parentheses in its current state. Hopefully you're also the right person to be bringing this too with this unique situation as well. Thank you again for putting this together in the first place! Utopes(talk / cont)09:31, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
@Utopes Thanks for stepping in on behalf of MusikBot again :) I believe I have actually fixed it now, as evidenced by Special:Diff/1185161703. I am fairly confident all will run as expected next week, but if not, please let me know :) Thanks again, — MusikAnimaltalk23:37, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
Getting specific topedits data for a user
Hello, could you possibly give me a list of pages in the talk namespace that have been edited by TheCarch *exactly once*, preferably with wikilinks, so I can once and for all deal with some disruption by this user? as far as I can determine the topedits interface gets me very frustratingly close to this goal but not quite, because the user I'm looking at has edited *juuuuust* over 1,000 pages (not counting the dozens I've deleted so far). Or can it let me do this and I've missed something? It's occurred to me that I could temp-delete thirty or forty pages to get the same effect but ... it's too late at night for that here. Thanks very much for any help you can provide! Graham87 (talk) 20:25, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
@Graham87 When browsing to Top Edits for a specific namespace, it should return all unique pages edited. Here is a query with a limit of 5000, thus producing a full list of unique Talk pages edited without having to paginate. You could work from the bottom of the list to find pages edited exactly once. Does this work for you?
Related, there is a request on the XTools Phabricator board to introduce a minimum edit option to Top Edits. In doing this, I could also add a maximum edit option, which I believe would fulfill your use case. — MusikAnimaltalk23:13, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, that full list is exactly what I needed! I'll try to remember the limit parameter in the URL if I ever encounter a situation like this again. I've subscribed to the task. Graham87 (talk) 03:18, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
@Graham87 Great! Just to be clear, on the default view limited to 1,000 results, there is pagination at the bottom allowing you to view the remaining pages. So you shouldn't need to use the limit parameter (though it's certainly useful to have it all on one page). I can add the pagination at the top as well, if that helps with usability. Or perhaps this is an accessibility issue, and you didn't notice the pagination at all? I just wanted to make sure :) — MusikAnimaltalk03:44, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
I noticed the pagination ... but it put the entries at the bottom in a seemingly random order so it wasn't very useful in that particular instance. Graham87 (talk) 04:01, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
Got it! The random order tells me it needs to sort by page as well as edit count to have a consistent order. So now I've got two improvements to make thanks to you, hehe! — MusikAnimaltalk04:32, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [74][75]
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Quechua Wikipedia, Romansh Wikipedia, Romani Wikipedia, Rundi Wikipedia, Aromanian Wikipedia, Tarandíne Wikipedia, Rusyn Wikipedia, Kinyarwanda Wikipedia, Sanskrit Wikipedia, Sakha Wikipedia, Santali Wikipedia, Sardinian Wikipedia, Sicilian Wikipedia, Scots Wikipedia, Sindhi Wikipedia, Northern Sami Wikipedia, Sango Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, Sinhala Wikipedia, Slovak Wikipedia, Slovenian Wikipedia, Samoan Wikipedia, Somali Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Serbian Wikipedia, Sranan Tongo Wikipedia, Swati Wikipedia, Southern Sotho Wikipedia, Saterland Frisian Wikipedia, Sundanese Wikipedia, Silesian Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Tulu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tetum Wikipedia, Tajik Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkmen Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia, Tswana Wikipedia, Tongan Wikipedia, Tok Pisin Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Tsonga Wikipedia, Tatar Wikipedia, Twi Wikipedia, Tahitian Wikipedia, Tuvinian Wikipedia, Udmurt Wikipedia, Uyghur Wikipedia, Uzbek Wikipedia, Venda Wikipedia, Venetian Wikipedia, Veps Wikipedia, West Flemish Wikipedia, Volapük Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [76][77][78]
The Vector 2022 skin will have some minor visual changes to drop-down menus, column widths, and more. These changes were added to four Wikipedias last week. If no issues are found, these changes will proceed to all wikis this week. These changes will make it possible to add new menus for readability and dark mode. Learn more. [79]
ThatOneWolf has given you some cookies! Cookies promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. You can spread the "WikiLove" by giving someone else some cookies, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend.
To spread the goodness of cookies, you can add {{subst:Cookies}} to someone's talk page with a friendly message, or eat this cookie on the giver's talk page with {{subst:munch}}!
Hi MusikAnimal. I tried making a change to {{rfp}} and {{rfplinks}} to add a |permission= parameter so that the permission-specific links at subpages of WP:PERM can also show up at WP:PERM#Current requests. Currently, the links change based on the page's name.
However, the extra wikitext confused PermClerk, since it construes {{Rfplinks|1=Username|permission=Rollback}} as having the username Username|permission=Rollback.
Would this be much of a bother to change? I'm not a programmer, but I made an attempt to see how the regex could be changed to allow this.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [80][81]
MediaWiki's JavaScript system will now allow async/await syntax in gadgets and user scripts. Gadget authors should remember that users' browsers may not support it, so it should be used appropriately. [82]
The deployment of "Add a link" announced last week was postponed. It will resume this week.
Hello! Voting in the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 11 December 2023. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The spacing between paragraphs on Vector 2022 has been changed from 7px to 14px to match the size of the text. This will make it easier to distinguish paragraphs from sentences. [83]
The "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is working again. You no longer need to switch to source editing to edit {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords. [84]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [85][86]
Registration & Scholarship applications are now open for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 that will take place from 3–5 May in Tallinn, Estonia. Scholarship applications are open until 5 January 2024.
I posted a message at Talk:XTools but noticed that no messages had been responded to in a few months. However, you did respond to several messages in the past so I'm just reaching out to see if you could provide more information. XTools has an upper limit of 600,000 edits before it stops breaking down an editor's work and providing them with very useful information. I'll be reaching this maximum in a few weeks and I'm concerned as I look at XTools several times a day to see different information including my latest admin stats and to see my namespace breakdown, pace of editing, number of edits/deleted edits, deleted pages and the like. Can this edit limit be raised? There is another message from an editor from the German Wikipedia with the same query.
I realize that the number of editors who reach this maximum is fairly limited but since there are just probably less than a hundred of us, it probably means that it won't be that taxing for the system. Please let me know if this would be possible and, if not, who I could talk to about this. Thank you very much. LizRead!Talk!18:54, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
Following a talk page discussion, the Administrators' accountability policy has been updated to note that while it is considered best practice for administrators to have notifications (pings) enabled, this is not mandatory. Administrators who do not use notifications are now strongly encouraged to indicate this on their user page.
Arbitration
Following a motion, the Extended Confirmed Restriction has been amended, removing the allowance for non-extended-confirmed editors to post constructive comments on the "Talk:" namespace. Now, non-extended-confirmed editors may use the "Talk:" namespace solely to make edit requests related to articles within the topic area, provided that their actions are not disruptive.
The Arbitration Committee has announced a call for Checkusers and Oversighters, stating that it will currently be accepting applications for CheckUser and/or Oversight permissions at any point in the year.
Hi MusikAnimal! I hope you're doing well and that life is treating you with kindness and ease. :-) I have a user who is asking on my talk page here if there's a tool or script exists to help with performing exactly what they're seeking to do. If you don't mind, could you review the request and see if such a tool exists? Call me a buffoon, but nothing comes to mind... Feel free to respond directly to the discussion or just let me know here. Either way would be greatly appreciated. :-D Thanks, and cheers - ~Oshwah~(talk)(contribs)03:50, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, hope you're doing well, too! I'm not aware of a tool to help with this. I tried using VisualEditor with veaction=edit but that was far worse given the heavy use of templates.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
On Wikimedia Commons, there are some minor user-interface improvements for the "choosing own vs not own work" step in the UploadWizard. This is part of the Structured Content team's project of improving UploadWizard on Commons. [88][89]
Problems
There was a problem showing the Newcomer homepage feature with the "impact module" and their page-view graphs, for a few days in early December. This has now been fixed. [90][91]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 December. It will be on all wikis from 14 December (calendar). [92][93]
Future changes
The 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 5 January 2024, and has an associated privacy statement.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2024 because of the holidays.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 December. It will be on all wikis from 21 December (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [94][95]
Starting December 18, it won't be possible to activate Structured Discussions on a user's own talk page using the Beta feature. The Beta feature option remains available for users who want to deactivate Structured Discussions. This is part of Structured Discussions' deprecation work. [96]
There will be full support for redirects in the Module namespace. The "Move Page" feature will leave an appropriate redirect behind, and such redirects will be appropriately recognized by the software (e.g. hidden from Special:UnconnectedPages). There will also be support for manual redirects. [97]
Future changes
The MediaWiki JavaScript documentation is moving to a new format. During the move, you can read the old docs using version 1.41. Feedback about the new site is welcome on the project talk page.
The Wishathon is a new initiative that encourages collaboration across the Wikimedia community to develop solutions for wishes collected through the Community Wishlist Survey. The first community Wishathon will take place from 15–17 March. If you are interested in a project proposal as a user, developer, designer, or product lead, you can register for the event and read more.
Nothing! Many bots are playfully represented as military aircraft, such as User:ClueBot NG. MusikBot and MusikBot II aren't really counter-vandalism bots, per se, so it makes a little less sense for them to presented in that way, but whatever. I just like helicopters :) — MusikAnimaltalk17:57, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for NYC Hacking Night at Prime Produce in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. This event is a successor to our inaugural December 2023 Hacking Night. It is intended primarily for technical contributors, though newcomers are welcome as well!
@Novem Linguae I don't think this is possible with the MassMessageListContent content model, or more specifically, the action=editmassmessagelist. I went to search Phab to see if anyone had requested this, and low and behold, you had this past June, haha! :) phab:T340517
I don't know much about content models other than wikitext, but as the edits to MMS lists are proper revisions, it would seem trivial to add support for a custom summary (at least in the API). — MusikAnimaltalk22:00, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
Funny that I already made a ticket. I guess no action for now until I write a patch for that ticket. Thanks for looking into it. Happy holidays :) –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:12, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
userRightsManager bug report: talk page message for MMS was mangled
Diff. If you scroll all the way down, the top and the bottom of the message shows raw template syntax, and the signature is missing. I have not tested if this is just for MMS, or also for other perms. No rush. Happy holidays! –Novem Linguae (talk) 11:14, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
A question about MusikBot FilterMonitor
As of this permalink the change to 1281 is showing as "<span style='color:red; Flags: disabled; Pattern modified" . I'm not sure if this is usual behavior, or if the bot should be doing <span style='color:red;> to close its syntax and actually color the change as red? EggRoll97(talk) 18:52, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
A solstice greeting
❄️Happy holidays!❄️
Hi MusikAnimal! I'd like to wish you a splendid solstice season as we wrap up the year. Here is an artwork, made individually for you, to celebrate. It was great to meet you in Toronto, and looking forward to collaborations in the coming year! Take care, and thanks for all you do to make Wikipedia better!Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}}talk
Solstice Celebration for MusikAnimal, 2023, DALL·E 3.
Merry Christmas, MusikAnimal! Or Season's Greetings or Happy Winter Solstice! As the year winds to a close, I would like to take a moment to recognize your hard work and offer heartfelt gratitude for all you do for Wikipedia. May this Holiday Season bring you nothing but joy, health and prosperity. Onel5969TT me15:15, 24 December 2023 (UTC)
Hi MusikAnimal! If I remember correctly, in order to grant me regular access to {{User WP}} and {{User WP/switch}}, you and Primefac kindly lowered the templates protections. Just wanted to inform you that I finally got templateeditor rights, so you could restore the protections where needed. Est. 2021 (talk·contribs) 15:39, 24 December 2023 (UTC)
Cycle between autotrophs and heterotrophs: autotrophs use light, carbon dioxide, and water to form oxygen and organic compounds, mainly through the process of photosynthesis (green arrow).
New year, new scripts. Welcome to the 23rd issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering around 39% of our favorite new and updated user scripts since 24 December 2021. That’s right, we haven’t published in two years! Can you believe it? Did you miss us?
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
User:Alexander Davronov/HistoryHelper has now become stable with some bugfixes and features such as automatically highlighting potentially uncivil edit summaries and automatically pinging all the users selected.
To a lesser extent, the same goes for User:PrimeHunter/Search sort.js. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
Aaron Liu: Watchlyst Greybar Unsin is a rewrite of Ais's Watchlist Notifier with modern APIs and several new features such as not displaying watchlist items marked as seen (hence the name), not bolding diffs of unseen watchlist elements which doesn’t work properly anyways, displaying the rendered edit summary, proper display of log and creation actions and more links.
Alexis Jazz: Factotum is a spiritual successor to reply-link with a host of extra features like section adding, link rewriting, regular expressions and more.
User:Aveaoz/AutoMobileRedirect: This script will automatically redirect MobileFrontend (en.m.wikipedia) to normal Wikipedia. Unlike existing scripts, this one will actually check if your browser is mobile or not through its secret agent string, so you can stay logged in on mobile! Hooray screen estate!
Deputy is a first-of-its-kind copyright cleanup toolkit. It overrides the interface for Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations for easy case processing. It also includes the functionality of the following (also new) scripts:
User:Elominius/gadget/diff arrow keys allows navigation between diffs with the arrow keys. It also has a version that requires holding Ctrl with the arrow key.
Frequently link to Wikipedia on your websites yet find generating CC-BY credits to be such a hassle? Say no more! User:Luke10.27/attribute will automatically do it for ya and copy the credit to yer clipboard.
User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft, a spiritual successor (i.e. fork) to Evad37's script, with a few bugs solved, and a host of extra features like check-boxes for choosing draftification reasons, multi-contributor notification, and appropriate warnings based on last edit time.
/CopyCodeBlock: one of the most important operations for any scripter and script-user is to copy and paste. This script adds a copy button in the top right of every code block (not to be confused with <code>) that will, well, copy it to your clipboard!
m:User:NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AceForLuaDebugConsole.js adds the Ace editor (a.k.a. the editor you see when editing JS, CSS and Lua on Wikimedia wikis) to the Lua debug console. "In my opinion, whoever designed it to be a plain <textarea> needs to seriously reconsider their decision."
GANReviewTool quickly and easily closes good article nominations.
ReviewStatus displays whether or not a mainspace page is marked as reviewed.
SpeciesHelper tries to add the correct speciesbox, category, taxonbar, and stub template to species articles.
User:Opencooper/svgReplace and Tol's fork replaces all rasterized SVGs with their original SVG codes for your loading pleasures. Tell us which one is better!
ArticleInfo displays page information at the top of the page, directly below the title.
/HeaderIcons takes away the Vector 2022 user dropdown and replaces it with all of the icons within, top level, right next to the Watchlist. One less click away! There's also an alternate version that uses text links instead of icons.
Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee rescinded the restrictions on the page name move discussions for the two Ireland pages that were enacted in June 2009.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
mediawiki2latex is a tool that converts wiki content into the formats of LaTeX, PDF, ODT, and EPUB. The code now runs many times faster due to recent improvements. There is also an optional Docker container you can install on your local machine.
The way that Random pages are selected has been updated. This will slowly reduce the problem of some pages having a lower chance of appearing. [98]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar). [99][100]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. [101]
Gadgets and personal user scripts may now use JavaScript syntax introduced in ES6 (also known as "ES2015") and ES7 ("ES2016"). MediaWiki validates the source code to protect other site functionality from syntax errors, and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. Previously, Gadgets could use the requiresES6 option. This option is no longer needed and will be removed in the future. [102]
An update on the status of the Community Wishlist Survey for 2024 has been published. Please read and give your feedback.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar). [105][106]
Starting on January 17, it will not be possible to login to Wikimedia wikis from some specific old versions of the Chrome browser (versions 51–66, released between 2016 and 2018). Additionally, users of iOS 12, or Safari on Mac OS 10.14, may need to login to each wiki separately. [107]
The jquery.cookie module was deprecated and replaced with the mediawiki.cookie module last year. A script has now been run to replace any remaining uses, and this week the temporary alias will be removed. [108]
MusikAnimal, just a heads up that MusikBot didn't update the DYK Nominations page at midnight tonight or the midnight before that. I made the necessary manual edits to move the Current header and add the new date on both occasions. I hope this is an easy fix; I'll keep an eye out in case it happens again over this weekend. Thank you for your help, and for the bot's regular updating of the page. BlueMoonset (talk) 05:08, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
So, I've confirmed this is an issue with Toolforge, see phab:T338006. The problem is that we're competing with a ton of other jobs that also run at 00:00 UTC, and the whole system basically breaks down. Fortunately there is a solution for small jobs like this that need to run at 00:00 UTC, but I don't know when that will be worked on. For now, I've increased the re-try rate – though, my understanding is that things are breaking before a retry is even attempted. Anyway, thanks for keeping an eye on it, and reporting the issues! I'm just relieved it isn't my code =P Regards, — MusikAnimaltalk08:41, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
A bug in UploadWizard prevented linking to the userpage of the uploader when uploading. It has now been fixed. [109]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 January. It will be on all wikis from 25 January (calendar). [110][111]
Sorry for missing your original message! Especially given you even provided the code, I will most certainly implement it :) However it may have to wait a bit as I'm about to go on holiday. I plan to make this regex string configurable at User:MusikBot/PermClerk/config, as the template could be changed again, and I don't think the community should have to go through me every time that happens. I've got this on my to-do list so I won't forget about it. I'll ping you when the change is live, hopefully in the coming week, but if not after I return from holiday in mid-February. Warm regards, — MusikAnimaltalk21:31, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Starting Monday January 29, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they are looking for, even if this comment was moved elsewhere. This will affect all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. You can read more about this change on Diff or on Mediawiki.org. [112]
There are some improvements to the CAPTCHA to make it harder for spam bots and scripts to bypass it. If you have feedback on this change, please comment on the task. Staff are monitoring metrics related to the CAPTCHA, as well as secondary metrics such as account creations and edit counts.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 January. It will be on all wikis from 1 February (calendar). [113][114]
Gadgets which only work in some skins have sometimes used the targets option to limit where you can use them. This will stop working this week. You should use the skins option instead. [116]
An RfC about increasing the inactivity requirement for Interface administrators is open for feedback.
Technical news
Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. (T326065)
Arbitration
Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee adopted a new enforcement restriction on January 4, 2024, wherein the Committee may apply the 'Reliable source consensus-required restriction' to specified topic areas.
Community feedback is requested for a draft to replace the "Information for administrators processing requests" section at WP:AE.
A vote to ratify the charter for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is open till 2 February 2024, 23:59:59 (UTC) via Secure Poll. All eligible voters within the Wikimedia community have the opportunity to either support or oppose the adoption of the U4C Charter and share their reasons. The details of the voting process and voter eligibility can be found here.
Community Tech has made some preliminary decisions about the future of the Community Wishlist Survey. In summary, they aim to develop a new, continuous intake system for community technical requests that improves prioritization, resource allocation, and communication regarding wishes. Read more
WikiWednesday is back this month! You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our WikiWednesday Salon at Prime Produce in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, with an online-based participation option also available. No experience of anything at all is required. All are welcome!
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person, you should be vaccinated and be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The mobile site history pages now use the same HTML as the desktop history pages. If you hear of any problems relating to mobile history usage please point them to the phabricator task.
On most wikis, admins can now block users from making specific actions. These actions are: uploading files, creating new pages, moving (renaming) pages, and sending thanks. The goal of this feature is to allow admins to apply blocks that are adequate to the blocked users' activity. Learn more about "action blocks". [117][118]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 February. It will be on all wikis from 8 February (calendar). [119][120]
Talk pages permalinks that included diacritics and non-Latin script were malfunctioning. This issue is fixed. [121]
Future changes
24 Wikipedias with Reference Tooltips as a default gadget are encouraged to remove that default flag. This would make Reference Previews the new default for reference popups, leading to a more consistent experience across wikis. For 46 Wikipedias with less than 4 interface admins, the change is already scheduled for mid-February, unless there are concerns. The older Reference Tooltips gadget will still remain usable and will override this feature, if it is available on your wiki and you have enabled it in your settings. [122][123]
MusikAnimal, just a heads up that MusikBot didn't update the DYK Nominations page at midnight tonight or the midnight before that. I made the necessary manual edits to move the Current header and add the new date on both occasions.
I suppose this is a follow-on to the last time I posted a similar message here, on 20 January. Since then, MusikBot missed 22 January, 25 January, 31 January, and 2 February, in addition to yesterday and today. (I missed 22 January as well, so the header was missing for four or five days until I finally noticed the absence.) In addition to the midnight run, perhaps you could have a secondary job at a later time, perhaps 01:30, to see whether the update was made, and try again when things aren't so busy? Or even schedule the original job for 00:03 or 00:05? I don't know what's involved, but I'm not always around to check up on the page right after midnight. Thank you very much for the bot, and I hope that the Toolforge issue you mentioned last month is dealt with soon, or you can find a workaround for it. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:17, 8 February 2024 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The WDQS Graph Split experiment is working and loaded onto 3 test servers. The team in charge is testing the split's impact and requires feedback from WDQS users through the UI or programmatically in different channels. [124][125][126] Users' feedback will validate the impact of various use cases and workflows around the Wikidata Query service. [127][128]
Problems
There was a bug that affected the appearance of visited links when using mobile device to access wiki sites. It made the links appear black; this issue is fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (calendar). [129][130]
As work continues on the grid engine deprecation,[131] tools on the grid engine will be stopped starting on February 14th, 2024. If you have tools actively migrating you can ask for an extension so they are not stopped. [132]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
If you have the "Email me when a page or a file on my watchlist is changed" option enabled, edits by bot accounts no longer trigger notification emails. Previously, only minor edits would not trigger the notification emails. [133]
There are changes to how user and site scripts load for Vector 2022 on specific wikis. The changes impacted the following Wikis: all projects with Vector legacy as the default skin, Wikivoyage, and Wikibooks. Other wikis will be affected over the course of the next three months. Gadgets are not impacted. If you have been affected or want to minimize the impact on your project, see this ticket. Please coordinate and take action proactively.
Newly auto-created accounts (the accounts you get when you visit a new wiki) now have the same local notification preferences as users who freshly register on that wiki. It is effected in four notification types listed in the task's description.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (calendar). [135][136]
Selected tools on the grid engine have been stopped as we prepare to shut down the grid on March 14th, 2024. The tool's code and data have not been deleted. If you are a maintainer and you want your tool re-enabled reach out to the team. Only tools that have asked for extension are still running on the grid.
The CSS filter property can now be used in HTML style attributes in wikitext. [137]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The mobile visual editor is now the default editor for users who never edited before, at a small group of wikis. Research shows that users using this editor are slightly more successful publishing the edits they started, and slightly less successful publishing non-reverted edits. Users who defined the wikitext editor as their default on desktop will get the wikitext editor on mobile for their first edit on mobile as well. [138]
The mw.config value wgGlobalGroups now only contains groups that are active in the wiki. Scripts no longer have to check whether the group is active on the wiki via an API request. A code example of the above is: if (/globalgroupname/.test(mw.config.get("wgGlobalGroups"))). [139]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 29 February (calendar). [140][141]
Future changes
The right to change edit tags (changetags) will be removed from users in Wikimedia sites, keeping it by default for admins and bots only. Your community can ask to retain the old configuration on your wiki before this change happens. Please indicate in this ticket to keep it for your community before the end of March 2024.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 24th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 24 December 2021. Uh-huh, we're finally covering the good ones among the rest! Aren't you excited? Remember to include a link in double brackets to the script's .js page when you install the script, so that we can see who uses the script in WhatLinksHere! The ScriptInstaller gadget automatically does this. Aaron Liu (talk) 01:00, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
Making user scripts load faster by SD0001 is this month's featured script, which caches userscripts every day to eliminate the overhead caused by force-downloading the newest version of scripts every time you open a Wikipedia page. Despite being released in April 2021, our best script scouters have failed to locate it due to its omission from the US of L. For security reasons, the script only supports loading JavaScript pages.
Newly maintained scripts
After earthly attempts at improving the original have failed...
Ahecht has created a fork of SiBr4/TemplateSearch, which adds the "TP:" shortcut for "Template:" in the search box, and updated it to be compatible with Vector 2022.
AquilaFasciata/goToTopFast is a much faster fork of the classic goToTop script that also adds compatibility for Minerva and Vector 2022.
Without caching. Each script takes 400–500ms. A particularly large script takes 1.11 s! Internet download speed is 50 Mbps.With caching enabled. Each script takes just 1-2 ms to load.
Improve a script
Unfortunately, this section has remained nearly identical. Help us out here!
To a lesser extent, the same goes for PrimeHunter/Search sort. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
Dragoniez/SuppressEnterInForm stops you from accidentally submitting anything due to pressing enter while in the smaller box, and works on almost anything... except the InputBox element itself, used in subscription lists and the Signpost Crossword! Oh, the humanity!
Doǵu/Adiutor(pictured) provides a nice, integrated interface to do some twinkley tasks such as copyvio detection, CSD tagging, and viewing the most recent diff.
Eejit43 has quite the aesthetically pleasing scripts, all made in TypeScript.
/afcrc-helper is a replacement for the unmaintained Enterprisey/AFCRHS and processes Redirects for Creation and Categories for Creation requests.
/ajax-undo stops the "undo" button from taking you to another page while providing a text box to provide a reason for the revert.
/redirect-helper(pictured) adds a much better interface for editing and redirects, including categorization, for which valid categories are dictated by /redirect-helper.json.
/rmtr-helper helps process technical requested moves without being able to actually move them.
Guycn2/UserInfoPopup(pictured) adds a flyout after the watchlist star on userspace pages that displays the common information you might use about a user.
Jeeputer/editCounter, under userspace, adds a portlet link to count your edits by namespace, put them in a table, and put that table in a hardcoded subpage, all in the background.
Hilst/Scripts/sectionLinks converts all section links to use the § sign, which are known to be preferred over the ugly # by 99% of the devils I've met.
PrimeHunter/Category source.js adds portlet links to tell you where a category for an article comes from and supports those from template transclusions.
Sophivorus's MiniEdit adds some nice, li'l buttons next to paragraphs to edit their wikitext with a minimal interface.
Edit-listings
Dragoniez/ToollinkTweaks adds more and customizable links next to users in page history, logs, watchlist, recent changes, etc.
Firefly/more-block-info optimizes the display of rangeblocks in contribution pages. Doesn't work outside the English locale of any wiki, unfortunately.
NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AjaxLoader makes paging links (e.g. older 50, 500, newest) load without refreshing and makes you realize how slow your internet actually is.
Appearance-ricing
Ahecht/RedirectID adds the redirect target to all redirects. For all the WP:NAVPOPS haters. (Do these exist?)
Dragoniez/MarkBLockedGlobal: Remember the "strike blocked usernames" gadget? Now you can use a red, dotted line to highlight rangeblocks and global locks!
Jonesey/common(pictured) has some styles to overhaul your Vector 2022 experience. It reduces padding everywhere, and makes the top bar animation faster.
Aaron Liu/V22 is a fork that narrows the sidebars instead of upheaving them, reverts the January 2024 dropdown changes, and restores the old page-link color for links that don't go outside the current wiki.
Nardog: SmartDiff is a spiritual successor to Enterprisey/fancy-diffs. It makes the page title part of links in diffs clickable, along with template and parser function calls. Unnamed parameters can be configured per template to also be linked. All links are styled based on the normal CSS classes of rendered links.
For the paranoid: Rublov/anonymize replaces your username at the top of the screen with the generic "User page" text. Remember, it is your duty to persuade everyone that editing is an honor.
/AjaxBlock provides a dialog box for easy input of reasons while blocking users.
/Selective Rollback(pictured) provides a dialog box to customize rollback edit summaries and does them without reloading the page. Seriously, why doesn't MediaWiki already do this?
/flickrsearch adds a portlet link to search for uploadable flickr images about the subject.
/randomincategory adds a portlet link when on Category pages to go to a random page in the current category.
Vghfr/EasyTemplates adds a portlet link to automatically insert some of the most common inline {{fix}} templates.
Yes, we're just doing 'em as we go now. Thanks for reading through this looong issue, if you did! I'm sure this'll send a record for the longest issue ev-ah. You may need to wait even longer for the last issue, as our reserve of old-y and goodie scripts have ran out... We encourage you to try and do some of the requests or improvement tasks. See you in Summer, hopefully!
The event will feature lightning talks and a Wiki-fashion show, for which you are encouraged to dress in your finest Wikimedia clothing and accessories (bags, buttons, even books), or clothing connected to the topics you edit on wiki projects.
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person you should be vaccinated and also be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Special:Book page (as well as the associated "Create a book" functionality) provided by the old Collection extension has been removed from all Wikisource wikis, as it was broken. This does not affect the ability to download normal books, which is provided by the Wikisource extension. [142]
Maintenance on etherpad is completed. If you encounter any issues, please indicate in this ticket.
Gadgets allow interface admins to create custom features with CSS and JavaScript. The Gadget and Gadget_definition namespaces and gadgets-definition-edit user right were reserved for an experiment in 2015, but were never used. These were visible on Special:Search and Special:ListGroupRights. The unused namespaces and user rights are now removed. No pages are moved, and no changes need to be made. [143]
A usability improvement to the "Add a citation" in Wikipedia workflow has been made, the insert button was moved to the popup header. [144]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (calendar). [145][146]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [147]
The HTML markup of headings and section edit links will be changed later this year to improve accessibility. See Heading HTML changes for details. The new markup will be the same as in the new Parsoid wikitext parser. You can test your gadget or stylesheet with the new markup if you add ?useparsoid=1 to your URL (more info) or turn on Parsoid read views in your user options (more info).
All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct. In addition, to participate in person, you should be vaccinated and be sure to respect others' personal space, and we may limit overall attendance size if appropriate.
MusikBot has missed three of the last five DYK updates
MusikAnimal, while it hasn't been consecutive days, MusikBot missed making the DYK nominations page updates at midnight on March 1, 3, and 5, but updated on the even-numbered March days, and the last four days in February. I'm not sure what it means, but you wanted to be notified if something seemed unusual. Thanks.
Oh wait, you wanted a haiku:
Did You Know that on
odd March days, MusikBot skips
nominations page?
@BlueMoonset Hehe, love the haiku :) I've finally coded in some retry logic. If the job doesn't run at 00:00, it will try again at 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 minutes past the hour. That hopefully should take care of this problem once and for all. I should note, however, that a Toolforge job might be "queued" at say, 00:10, but won't actually run until some time later. So I would give it until maybe 00:20 before we conclude it didn't run and/or broke somehow. I'll be monitoring the logs for tonight's run, which is in about 15 minutes!
Okay, it seems to work! It ran fine on the first try, but I observed it run again at each specified interval. As expected, it detected that it had already ran successfully and short-circuited. So hopefully if I hear from you again, it's not about this :) Cheers! — MusikAnimaltalk00:04, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (calendar). [148][149]
After consulting with various communities, the line height of the text on the Minerva skin will be increased to its previous value of 1.65. Different options for typography can also be set using the options in the menu, as needed. [150]
The active link color in Minerva will be changed to provide more consistency with our other platforms and best practices. [151]
Structured data on Commons will no longer ask whether you want to leave the page without saving. This will prevent the “information you’ve entered may not be saved” popups from appearing when no information have been entered. It will also make file pages on Commons load faster in certain cases. However, the popups will be hidden even if information has indeed been entered. If you accidentally close the page before saving the structured data you entered, that data will be lost. [152]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [153][154]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The notice "Language links are at the top of the page" that appears in the Vector 2022 skin main menu has been removed now that users have learned the new location of the Language switcher. [155]
IP info feature displays data from Spur, an IP addresses database. Previously, the only data source for this feature was MaxMind. Now, IP info is more useful for patrollers. [156]
The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. [157][158][159]
RevisionSlider is an interface to interactively browse a page's history. Users in right-to-left languages reported RevisionSlider reacting wrong to mouse clicks. This should be fixed now. [161]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 March. It will be on all wikis from 21 March (calendar). [162][163]
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [164][165]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
An update was made on March 18th 2024 to how various projects load site, user JavaScript and CSS in Vector 2022 skin. A checklist is provided for site admins to follow.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 March. It will be on all wikis from 28 March (calendar). [166][167]
Hi MusikAnimal. Thank you for getting the Hasil Adkins article to GA and uploading File:Hasil Adkins - No More Hot Dogs.ogg. I was thinking of adding some timed text to the file if that's okay. I wrote an article for No More Hot Dogs and was looking for a reference I could use to confirm that the song was recorded in his home studio in 1955. If you know of one, please let me know. gobonobo+c21:59, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. (T313405)
Arbitration
An arbitration case has been opened to look into "the intersection of managing conflict of interest editing with the harassment (outing) policy".
Miscellaneous
Editors are invited to sign up for The Core Contest, an initiative running from April 15 to May 31, which aims to improve vital and other core articles on Wikipedia.
And 10 years of you kindly reminding me! It's amazing you're still at it. However small, the expressions of WikiLove really do help with editor retention. So thank you, @Gerda Arendt, for your role in keeping many of us around :) — MusikAnimaltalk21:30, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-14
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Users of the reading accessibility beta feature will notice that the default line height for the standard and large text options has changed. [168]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 April. It will be on all wikis from 4 April (calendar). [169][170]
Future changes
The Wikimedia Foundation has an annual plan. The annual plan decides what the Wikimedia Foundation will work on. You can now read the draft key results for the Product and Technology department. They are suggestions for what results the Foundation wants from big technical changes from July 2024 to June 2025. You can comment on the talk page.
Backlog update: The October drive reduced the article backlog from 11,626 to 7,609 and the redirect backlog from 16,985 to 6,431! Congratulations to Schminnte, who led with over 2,300 points.
Following that, New Page Patrol organized another backlog drive for articles in January 2024. The January drive started with 13,650 articles and reduced the backlog to 7,430 articles. Congratulations to JTtheOG, who achieved first place with 1,340 points in this drive.
Looking at the graph, it seems like backlog drives are one of the only things keeping the backlog under control. Another backlog drive is being planned for May. Feel free to participate in the May backlog drive planning discussion.
It's worth noting that both queues are gradually increasing again and are nearing 14,034 articles and 22,540 redirects. We encourage you to keep contributing, even if it's just a single patrol per day. Your support is greatly appreciated!
2023 Awards
Onel5969 won the 2023 cup with 17,761 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 50/day. There was one Platinum Award (10,000+ reviews), 2 Gold Awards (5000+ reviews), 6 Silver (2000+), 8 Bronze (1000+), 30 Iron (360+) and 70 more for the 100+ barnstar. Hey man im josh led on redirect reviews by clearing 36,175 of them. For the full details, see the Awards page and the Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone for their efforts in reviewing!
Recruitment: A couple of the coordinators have been inviting editors to become reviewers, via mass-messages to their talk pages. If you know someone who you'd think would make a good reviewer, then a personal invitation to them would be great. Additionally, if there are Wikiprojects that you are active on, then you can add a post there asking participants to join NPP. Please be careful not to double invite folks that have already been invited.
Reviewing tip: Reviewers who prefer to patrol new pages within their most familiar subjects can use the regularly updated NPP Browser tool.
Much has happened since the last newsletter over two months ago. The open letter finished with 444 signatures. The letter was sent to several dozen people at the WMF, and we have heard that it is being discussed but there has been no official reply. A related article appears in the current issue of The Signpost. If you haven't seen it, you should, including the readers' comment section.
Awards: Barnstars were given for the past several years (thanks to MPGuy2824), and we are now all caught up. The 2021 cup went to John B123 for leading with 26,525 article reviews during 2021. To encourage moderate activity, a new "Iron" level barnstar is awarded annually for reviewing 360 articles ("one-a-day"), and 100 reviews earns the "Standard" NPP barnstar. About 90 reviewers received barnstars for each of the years 2018 to 2021 (including the new awards that were given retroactively). All awards issued for every year are listed on the Awards page. Check out the new Hall of Fame also.
Software news: Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have connected with WMF developers who can review and approve patches, so they have been able to fix some bugs, and make other improvements to the Page Curation software. You can see everything that has been fixed recently here. The reviewer report has also been improved.
NPP backlog May – October 15, 2022
Suggestions:
There is much enthusiasm over the low backlog, but remember that the "quality and depth of patrolling are more important than speed".
Reminder: an article should not be tagged for any kind of deletion for a minimum of 15 minutes after creation and it is often appropriate to wait an hour or more. (from the NPP tutorial)
Reviewers should focus their effort where it can do the most good, reviewing articles. Other clean-up tasks that don't require advanced permissions can be left to other editors that routinely improve articles in these ways (creating Talk Pages, specifying projects and ratings, adding categories, etc.) Let's rely on others when it makes the most sense. On the other hand, if you enjoy doing these tasks while reviewing and it keeps you engaged with NPP (or are guiding a newcomer), then by all means continue.
This user script puts a link to the feed in your top toolbar.
Backlog:
Saving the best for last: From a July low of 8,500, the backlog climbed back to 11,000 in August and then reversed in September dropping to below 6,000 and continued falling with the October backlog drive to under 1,000, a level not seen in over four years. Keep in mind that there are 2,000 new articles every week, so the number of reviews is far higher than the backlog reduction. To keep the backlog under a thousand, we have to keep reviewing at about half the recent rate!
Reminders
Newsletter feedback - please take this short poll about the newsletter.
If you're interested in instant messaging and chat rooms, please join us on the New Page Patrol Discord, where you can ask for help and live chat with other patrollers.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be a reviewer, please ask any admin to remove you from the group. If you want the tools back again, just ask at PERM.
To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.
The October drive reduced the backlog from 9,700 to an amazing 0! Congratulations to WaddlesJP13 who led with 2084 points. See this page for further details. The queue is steadily rising again and is approaching 2,000. It would be great if <2,000 were the “new normal”. Please continue to help out even if it's only for a few or even one patrol a day.
2022 Awards
Onel5969 won the 2022 cup for 28,302 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 80/day. There was one Gold Award (5000+ reviews), 11 Silver (2000+), 28 Iron (360+) and 39 more for the 100+ barnstar. Rosguill led again for the 4th year by clearing 49,294 redirects. For the full details see the Awards page and the Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone!
Minimum deletion time: The previous WP:NPP guideline was to wait 15 minutes before tagging for deletion (including draftification and WP:BLAR). Due to complaints, a consensus decided to raise the time to 1 hour. To illustrate this, very new pages in the feed are now highlighted in red. (As always, this is not applicable to attack pages, copyvios, vandalism, etc.)
New draftify script: In response to feedback from AFC, the The Move to Draft script now provides a choice of set messages that also link the creator to a new, friendly explanation page. The script also warns reviewers if the creator is probably still developing the article. The former script is no longer maintained. Please edit your edit your common.js or vector.js file from User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js to User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft.js
Redirects: Some of our redirect reviewers have reduced their activity and the backlog is up to 9,000+ (two months deep). If you are interested in this distinctly different task and need any help, see this guide, this checklist, and spend some time at WP:RFD.
Discussions with the WMF The PageTriage open letter signed by 444 users is bearing fruit. The Growth Team has assigned some software engineers to work on PageTriage, the software that powers the NewPagesFeed and the Page Curation toolbar. WMF has submitted dozens of patches in the last few weeks to modernize PageTriage's code, which will make it easier to write patches in the future. This work is helpful but is not very visible to the end user. For patches visible to the end user, volunteers such as Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have been writing patches for bug reports and feature requests. The Growth Team also had a video conference with the NPP coordinators to discuss revamping the landing pages that new users see.
Reminders
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Additionally, you are invited to City Tech Library LGBTQIA edit-a-thon at the New York City College of Technology Library in Downtown Brooklyn! Join us in person on April 11th to learn about these great new materials at City Tech Library; to learn about editing Wikipedia; and to help increase representation of LGBTQIA individuals and issues online. All are welcome, new and experienced!
Interested in attending, but not a CUNY student or faculty? Please get in touch; we'll help you navigate City Tech building security. Email Jen: jennifer.hoyer18 (at) citytech.cuny.edu.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Web browsers can use tools called extensions. There is now a Chrome extension called Citation Needed which you can use to see if an online statement is supported by a Wikipedia article. This is a small experiment to see if Wikipedia can be used this way. Because it is a small experiment, it can only be used in Chrome in English.
A new Edit Recovery feature has been added to all wikis, available as a user preference. Once you enable it, your in-progress edits will be stored in your web browser, and if you accidentally close an editing window or your browser or computer crashes, you will be prompted to recover the unpublished text. Please leave any feedback on the project talk page. This was the #8 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
Readers using the Minerva skin on mobile will notice there has been an improvement in the line height across all typography settings. [173]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 April. It will be on all wikis from 11 April (calendar). [174][175]
New accounts and logged-out users will get the visual editor as their default editor on mobile. This deployment is made at all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. [176]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Between 2 April and 8 April, on wikis using Flagged Revisions, the "Reverted" tag was not applied to undone edits. In addition, page moves, protections and imports were not autoreviewed. This problem is now fixed. [177][178]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 April. It will be on all wikis from 18 April (calendar). [179][180]
Default category sort keys will now affect categories added by templates placed in footnotes. Previously footnotes used the page title as the default sort key even if a different default sort key was specified (category-specific sort keys already worked). [181]
A new variable page_last_edit_age will be added to abuse filters. It tells how many seconds ago the last edit to a page was made. [182]
Future changes
Volunteer developers are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. Learn more.
Four database fields will be removed from database replicas (including Quarry). This affects only the abuse_filter and abuse_filter_history tables. Some queries might need to be updated. [183]
Seems like it. I'll look into it when I get a chance. Fortunately it seems like a one-off as the bot ran successfully this past Sunday. — MusikAnimaltalk17:21, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
You can nominate your favorite tools for the fifth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations will be open until May 10.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 April. It will be on all wikis from 25 April (calendar). [185][186]
Future changes
This is the last warning that by the end of May 2024 the Vector 2022 skin will no longer share site and user scripts/styles with old Vector. For user-scripts that you want to keep using on Vector 2022, copy the contents of Special:MyPage/vector.js to Special:MyPage/vector-2022.js. There are more technical details available. Interface administrators who foresee this leading to lots of technical support questions may wish to send a mass message to your community, as was done on French Wikipedia. [187]
Samsara was the protecting admin. I see they are now inactive, so you can ask at WP:RFUP. My thoughts are that this subject is likely prone to more disruption given its prominence in pop culture, and should probably stay protected, but I'd rather someone else make the call. Best, — MusikAnimaltalk23:22, 27 April 2024 (UTC)
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).
We are now serving 1% of all global user traffic from Kubernetes (you can read more technical details). We are planning to increment this percentage regularly. You can follow the progress of this work.
Fixed Thanks for reporting! — MusikAnimal talk 20:39, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
Administrator changes
Interface administrator changes
Technical news
Arbitration
As part of the changes for the better diff handling of paragraph splits, improved detection of splits is being rolled out. Over the last two weeks, we deployed this support to group0 and group1 wikis. This week it will be deployed to group2 wikis. [29]
Guideline and policy news
Miscellaneous
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The 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 5 January 2024, and has an associated privacy statement.
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
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Bureaucrat changes
Newly maintained scripts
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You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § AI for WP guidelines/ policies. ExclusiveEditor Notify Me! 09:47, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
